books.google.com - "With his trademark humor and irreverence, Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and bestselling author of Making the Mummies Dance, delves into an important aspect of modern culture - art forgery - to reveal the appalling scams, the duplicitous perpetrators, and the hapless...https://books.google.com/books/about/False_Impressions.html?id=ly6nlP0DQIoC&utm_source=gb-gplus-shareFalse Impressions

False Impressions: The Hunt for Big-time Art Fakes

"With his trademark humor and irreverence, Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and bestselling author of Making the Mummies Dance, delves into an important aspect of modern culture - art forgery - to reveal the appalling scams, the duplicitous perpetrators, and the hapless dupes, from the beginning of civilization to the present." "This is a big, broad book on art fakes, fakers, and suckers written in Hoving's signature style - amusing, wicked, and mischievous. From the shroud of Turin to Pre-Columbian pottery, Hoving covers the biggest, the best, the most embarrassing, and the most costly forgeries - most never before published, some he himself collected. He explains the differences between out-right forgeries and works so overly restored and tarted up the result is tantamount to forgery." "Hoving exposes the scams and tells why people, including knowledgeable collectors, continue to fall for them. He characterizes the fakers, their middlemen, and the "marks," the greedy, gullible, and moneyed private collectors and institutions who got taken in by some of the most amusing and imaginative con games of all time. He examines the motives of the fakers and the dupes (it's not always money), and introduces us to the talented "fakebusters" whose job it is to expose the truth. And he answers the question, "If a fake fools everybody, why isn't it as good as the genuine article?""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

From inside the book

LibraryThing Review

User Review - juglicerr - LibraryThing

False Impressions is a book about art forgery, mostly the adventures and misadventures of Thomas Hoving as he has detected forgeries, and, to his chagrin, learned that he has been fooled. It is ... Read full review

LibraryThing Review

User Review - pbadeer - LibraryThing

at the risk of sounding like a simpleton, this book would have been far better as a picture book. So much time is spent in trying to DESCRIBE the fakes against the originals, a photo or illustration ... Read full review

References to this book

About the author (1996)

Thomas Hoving, a former director of New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the man who invented the blockbuster exhibition and changed forever the sleepy world of the art museum. He has written two novels and several works of nonfiction, including the national best-seller "Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art." He was editor-in-chief of "Connoisseur" magazine and is now president of Hoving Associates Inc., an international museum and cultural affairs consulting firm.